The Nonlinear Impact of Task Rewards and Duration on Solvers’ Participation Behavior: A Study on Online Crowdsourcing Platform

Keng Yang,Hanying Qi

doi:10.3390/jtaer16040041

Abstract

Crowdsourcing has attracted significant attention in the past decade because it has more competitive advantages than traditional methods for mobilizing distributed labor and utilizing innovation. Crowdsourcing contests are one of the most popular and effective crowdsourcing modes. Reasonable task rewards and duration are the key factors for seekers to attract solvers who can efficiently participate in the crowdsourcing contest task. Previous studies have mainly focused on task results to analyze solvers’ participation behavior in crowdsourcing contests, but have paid little attention to the task process, and there have been conflicting conclusions regarding the impact of task rewards and duration on solvers’ participation behavior and the performance of crowdsourcing contests. In view of this gap, this study collected 2706 logo design task data points from 2015–2017 on an online crowdsourcing platform and measured the performance of solvers’ participation behavior in two stages. The participation time was used to represent the performance of solvers’ participation behavior in the task process, while the number of submissions of solutions was used to represent the performance of participation behavior in the task result. The results show that task rewards and duration have an inverted U-shaped effect on the number of submissions, money rewards have a positive impact on participation time, and duration has an inverted U-shaped relationship with participation time. This study proposes the nonlinear effects of task rewards and duration on participation behavior and explains the reason for the conflicting results of previous studies. This paper also expands upon existing research by using solvers’ participation time in the task process to measure the performance of solvers’ participation behavior.

Highlights

Crowdsourcing is a process in which tasks traditionally performed by internal employees are outsourced to the public through open collection [1]
The quadratic terms of task rewards and duration were added into the regression model, with the result reported in Column
Based on the image of the quadratic function, this indicated that the relationship between task rewards and the number of submissions had an inverted U-shape, verifying Hypothesis 1

Summary

Introduction

Crowdsourcing is a process in which tasks traditionally performed by internal employees are outsourced to the public through open collection [1]. The crowdsourcing contest process contains three steps: first, a seeker issues a task and specifies the task requirements, duration, and rewards; second, solvers submit solutions to solve the problem or task issued by the seeker; third, the seeker evaluates the solutions, identifies the best solution, and pays rewards to the solver whose solution is selected [2]. From the perspective of task design characteristics, the main influencing factors include task rewards [3], task duration [4], task description [4], and difficulty level [5]. In terms of environmental factors, these include contest intensity, market price [5], and task seekers’ characteristics [6]. Regarding solvers’ characteristics, self-knowledge and experience are the influencing factors [7,8].

Methods

Results

Conclusion